Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Bandit

One of the creators and also the webmaster of a popular trucker social site called “Dispatch Me Home” died this week from a long illness. Bruce Walter Wieser, 67, of Ayden, NC, died Feb. 1, 2013. He retired from trucking in 2007 and was known by most of his friends simply as “Bandit.”

And, yes, his CB handle was “Bandit” long before the silver screen pranks of Burt Reynolds had Sheriff Buford T. Justice cursing that name.

I first got to know Bandit through a mutual friend – OOIDA member and columnist Bob “Cowpoke” Martin, who wrote some of Land Line’s best trucker anecdotal columns. Cowpoke passed away in October 2011. But before he did, he introduced me a popular trucking website known as “Dispatch Me Home.”

At OOIDA, we love good truckin’ stories and this “DMH” website is full of them. The website was inspired by a book written by Greg Martin called “Dispatch Me Home.” The interactive site was built by Wieser in order to allow drivers and their friends and families to become interactive in the DMH project and share trucking stories.

You can go to the DMH website and surf around or go to the interactive site and sign up. You can post stories, comments, and up to 25 photos on your page. On the homepage there are more than 500 photos, some members’ photos, some not. There is everything from show trucks to antiques. It’s a great collection.

Cowpoke used to tell me that what he liked about it was there was just one rule: “Whatever you post on Dispatch Me Home, you gotta keep it clean; there may be truck drivers looking in.”

“Bandit checks everything that’s posted,” Cowpoke used to say. He swore he’d never seen anything off-color get by Wieser.

Bandit was a good guy. I’ll miss him and his positive, ever hopeful emails.

I hope he and Cowpoke are reunited in a good place and again swapping trucker stories. If that good place is where I think it is, I know that off-color rule applies now more than ever.

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